Silvan S. Schweber - In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB

PRINCETON SERIES IN PHYSICS

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In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist by S. S. Schweber

More Is Different: Fifty Years of Condensed Matter Physics edited by N. Phuan Ong and Ravin N. Bhatt

IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB:

Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist

S. S. Schweber

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2000 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,

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All Rights Reserved

Third printing, and first paperback printing, 2007

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12785-9

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-691-12785-9

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows

Schweber, S. S. (Silvan S.)

In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the moral responsibility of the scientist / S. S. Schweber

p. cm. (Princeton series in physics)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-04989-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 19041967. 2. Bethe, Hans Albrecht, 19063. Atomic bombMoral and ethical aspectsUnited States. 4. Nuclear physicsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title. II. Series.

QC774.O56 S32 2000

172.422dc21 99052225

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Utopia and Bluejack display

Printed on acid-free paper.

pup.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

For Paul Forman and Anne Harrington,

special friends,

Everett Mendelsohn,

a special colleague,

and Miriam

Preface

I used to be a theoretical physicist. I did my graduate studies at Princeton University from 1949 to 1952. During my stay in Princeton, theoretical physics was dominated by Eugene Wigner, the Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics at the university, and Robert Oppenheimer, who recently had become the director of the Institute for Advanced Study. On Fridays, the departmental colloquium would bring Oppenheimer, when he was in town, to the university, and the comments by Wigner and Oppenheimer would expose their contrasting views of the world. Every Wednesday afternoon all the theory students would trek out to the Institute to attend the theoretical physics seminar there and listen to Oppenheimers often acerbic comments on the presentation.

Princeton was an enormously stimulating place. I still vividly remember Einstein giving a series of lectures on unified field theory; Bohr and Einstein presenting their differing views on quantum mechanics in inaudible and incomprehensible mutterings; Pauli talking on spin and statistics; von Neumann commenting on David Bohms formulation of the quantum theory of measurement and his walking out of a lecture by Julian Schwinger. The atmosphere in Fine Hall, the home of the mathematics department, was equally heady. In addition, there was a rich cultural life. I recall Hermann Weyl delivering his lectures on symmetry; Eugene Wigner giving a talk at the Graduate School on the limits of science; Bertrand Russell giving a lecture to a packed auditorium, and Dylan Thomas arriving late and drunk to give passionate, moving readings of his poetry.

But the years I spent at Princeton were also tense times. The Cold War had intensified, and when I arrived there in September 1949 the USSR had just detonated its first plutonium bomb. That fall, an intense debate took place on whether to develop an H-bomb. I caught my first glimpse of Hans Bethe when he was leaving Wigners office sometime in October 1949. He was in Princeton to discuss with Oppenheimer the feasibility of a fusion bomb. The following spring, David Bohm, a brilliant young theoretical physicist who had been a staff member at the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley during the war and then became an assistant professor in Princetons Department of Physics, was cited in contempt of Congress; he had taken the Fifth Amendment when refusing to answer certain questions posed to him by the House Un-American Activities Committee. In 1950 he was indicted. When the president of Princeton University, Harold Dodds, decreed thereafter that Bohm could not set foot on campus, a delegation of physics graduate students, including me, went to speak to him to appeal that decision. After a brief exchange, we were reprimanded, reminded that Gentlemen, there is a war on! and were invited to leave. Two of us then went to see Oppenheimer, who had been Bohms teacher at Berkeley, and he graciously offered Bohm a desk at the Institute.

In the fall of 1952, I went to Cornell as a postdoctoral fellow to work with Hans Bethe. Freeman Dyson, who had been appointed the previous year to a full professorship to replace Richard Feynman, who had gone to Cal Tech, was also there. I was one of a large contingent of postdoctoral fellows and research associates who, together with the half-dozen or so graduate students in theory, formed a lively intellectual community. All of us had offices in the recently built Newman Laboratory for Nuclear Studies, and every day nearly all of us would go out to lunch with Bethewhen he was in townat the nearby cafeteria run by Cornells Department of Home Economics.

On arriving at Cornell I was struck by the fact that the doors to the offices of Robert (Bob) Wilson, the director of the laboratory, and Bethe were always open. The professors doors at Princeton had always been closed. Bethe and Wilson shared a secretary, Velma Ray, whose station was at the entrance to their offices. The intensity and closeness of the interaction between theorists and experimenters were also immediately apparent. Every weekend there would be a party at the apartment of one of the postdoctoral fellows or research associates to which everyone was invited. And it was not unusual for people to get drunk on these occasionsliquor was plentiful and no one had any apprehensions about letting their guard down.

A pervasive sense of community is the strongest impression I have of Cornell. Among the high-energy theorists the sense of community was heightened by the fact that during the two years I spent at Cornell, most of us were engaged in a collective research program on meson-nucleon scattering. At the time, it was not clear to me who or what was responsible for the sense of community. I took for granted the various forums that melded the community. In the Nuclear Lab, we had weekly Friday afternoon gatherings at which theorists and experimenters presented their latest findings in a form that everyone would understand, and there were weekly Monday evening meetings of the Journal Club, at which the latest papers and preprints would be discussed critically for the benefit of everyone. In addition, every week on Monday afternoon, a colloquium brought together the high-energy staff of the Newman Lab and the other members of the department, most of whom were were solid state physicists.